


Anno Domini 1915

by thegirlwiththemouseyhair



Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Gen, Magic-Users, Misses Clause Challenge, Permanent Injury, Pre-Canon, World War I, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-02 03:12:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2797466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegirlwiththemouseyhair/pseuds/thegirlwiththemouseyhair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I hope this fits the bill, recip - you said to give you Merriman, but I've just passed The Learning chapters in my reread of TDIR and recalled how much I love Miss Greythorne, so have some pre-canon Old Ones. I also hope this isn't too grim for a gift!</p>
    </blockquote>





	Anno Domini 1915

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spiderfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiderfire/gifts).



> I hope this fits the bill, recip - you said to give you Merriman, but I've just passed The Learning chapters in my reread of TDIR and recalled how much I love Miss Greythorne, so have some pre-canon Old Ones. I also hope this isn't too grim for a gift!

“The hospitals’ll be no use in these dark days,” Mary Greythorne said, bitterly. “They’ve no time for things they can’t cure – but I will need your help with the spell.”

Her lovely face was white and creased with pain. Merriman gazed at the twisting of her knees and legs and suppressed a grimace. She had hastened home using her gifts, and summoned him so that he met her at Huntercombe Manor mere hours after her accident. But there were limits even to the gift of Gramarye. She should not have gone charging after poachers in the woods of her late father’s lands up north, where she had spent little time in her long life, and gotten too busy acting the imperious heiress of a rich family to recall that the Dark, too, had their tracks and their places.

“I’m nearly seventy years old, you know,” Miss Greythorne countered, as if she had read her companion’s thoughts. She probably had. Merriman’s frown deepened in annoyance and concern. She was young by the standards of the Old Ones, but proud; of course she insisted on being treated as much like an equal as she could get away with.

“Then with all due respect I wish you had _acted_ it,” Merriman said.

Miss Greythorne’s red lips went slack with fear then, real fear, for the first time since the riding accident. It wasn’t that his tone was insulting – but she had read the grimness in his words and his mind. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again, unable to think of a suitable reply. Really, she thought, she _had_ been careless. The Dark could hardly destroy one of her kind, but they had their tricks, like the sudden bursting of a clamour of their damned rooks from a nest beside a shy and utterly common new horse. She was not a girl and newly awake anymore. She wasn’t even the woman of thirty five or forty that she so resembled: she should have been more careful.

“But there’s so much work to be done,” she said aloud. It was true. She was needed. They were all needed, as badly as they ever had been since she woke to her powers, though not quite as badly as they would be needed in years to come. She could not end up like those poor men streaming home with legs shot off and confined to wheelchairs for the rest of their lives, with their families fretting over what to _do_ with them. She couldn’t – not with her gifts.

“We do have to _try_ ,” she said again, her voice rising. “We shan’t leave here until I’m right again – until we find the right spell of healing, that’s all.”

Merriman said nothing more just yet, only looked at her sadly.


End file.
